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Monday, October 21, 2013

Congratulations EVE Team

Congratulations to Tom Woods and the EVE science team for flying another calibration rocket into space!

NASA successfully launched a Black Brant IX sounding rocket at 2 p.m. ET from the White Sands Missile Range, N.M., carrying instrumentation to help calibrate the EUV Variability Experiment, or EVE, aboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, satellite. The project scientist Tom Woods, from the University of Colorado at Boulder, confirmed that good data was received during the flight.

EVE measures the total extreme ultraviolet output of the sun, called its spectral irradiance. As part of the SDO/EVE program, the rocket calibration flight occurs about once a year to accurately determine the long-term variations of the solar extreme ultraviolet irradiance. This kind of calibration is known as an under-flight. It uses a near-replica of the SDO/EVE instrument to gather a calibrated sounding rocket observation in coordination with the orbital satellite's observations. Comparison of the two data sets then validates the accuracy of the SDO/EVE data, providing crucial calibration of any long-term changes in the orbital instrumentation. This will be the fourth under-flight calibration for the EVE instrument. The previous flight was successfully conducted on June 23, 2012.